Tuesday, December 18, 2012

And as much as I love the Rankin-Bass 1977
cartoon (I mean I still see elves to this day as sour-faced greyish
plant monsters) it's usurped in the number one position by another, lesser-known foreign-made film: The Fabulous Journey of Mr. Bilbo
Baggins the Hobbit,
a live-action version produced in the Soviet Union (no less) in 1985.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Robert Parker, player
of mountebank-turned-”god-king”Manzafrain the Mirthful in my G+
campaign, trotted out a spot-on analysis about the Hill Cantons
back-end mechanics—what he nicely terms the “world engine”--in a
post yesterday.

I've been reluctant to talk over much
about the “Chaos Index” blog side as it's awfully close to home
in revealing how I make the “whirly bits” (the moving
parts that lie outside what the PCs do) whirl. But Robert has let the
proverbial cat out of the bag (with my blessing) so a few more
clarifications are in order.

Reading Robert's account (which is
quite good overall) one might get the impression that I run a crazy,
over-elaborated, mechanistic system on my off days at the table.
Crazy, I will cop too but what's going on is probably less rigid then
it seems.

An early prototype of the Chaos Index . Click to enlarge.

First off the whole “track” concept
(a mechanic grabbed from old wargames with political dimensions) is
tied to the tension between human civilization/stability/corelands
and the Weird/reality-bending in the campaign world (see here for the
full tour of that who-ha). It's somewhat akin to the Law vs. Chaos
tension we all know and love, but not quite: the Weird is not
necessarily inimical to humanity, though it has a strong tendency to
act that way. The whole she-bang has a definite geographical
expression in the campaign, the stable corelands lose physical and
metaphorical ground and the Weird rises and vice versa.

The Index is just the ball park
tracker for that struggle in the particular corner of the world the
characters do their business in. A big emphasis on “ball park”
because what's not happening—and this was a central feature of the
World Pattern schemata from the old Douglas Bachmann article that
inspired it—is that when you hit certain points a rigidly defined
event happens. In that old Dragon article when the chaos
marker (on a track) hits say one point a war breaks out or a plague
happens. While that's evil DM fun for a while, it ties you in my
opinion way too rigidly to the whole scheme.

Stop fucking with us...

What I do instead is tend to brainstorm
likely events (and on occasion roll them on the old AD&D Oriental
Adventures events charts) and ask myself “how probable is this to
happen and if it does how intense will it be?” How far the track is
on the stable or weird side influences the number of dice I throw
Matrix game side when answering the question. If the Weird is riding
high, for instance, the chance of some kind of large scale
supernatural strangeness occurring goes up (the “argument”
strength goes up in other words).

Keep in mind the system is also
hardwired not to be a High Fantasy business. In a campaign
that is still really mostly about murderhoboes bouncing around
exploring a strange and dangerous, robbing it of its wealth and
blowing it in a debauch, saving the world from Chaos typically only
comes as a self-interested after thought. The G+ party just famously
saved the besieged city of Kezmarok facing an imminent collapse, but
only after pushing the Index up themselves session after session
disturbing the slumber of necromantic kings transitioning to
Kirbyesque space gods deep in the undercity.

The Index by itself moves spaces back
to balance--when in-game events and triggers don't keep propelling it
away. Which, of course, the players so often do with their mucking
around in places best kept locked and forgotten (cue the maniacal
laughter).

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

“Benedicto: May your trails be
crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing
view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your
rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling
with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark
primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal
and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas,
domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into
a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on
profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where
storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where
something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than
your deepest dreams waits for you--beyond that next turning of the
canyon walls.”

- Ed Abbey

Mastering natural description is a real
bear in tabletop rpgs. It's a damn tricky balancing act that charts
a tight little channel between the Scylla of bland terseness (“you're
in a forest”) and the Charybdis of eye-glazing purple prose
description.

Gaming products rarely hit this sweet
spot in their unrushed published forms, pulling it off at the table
even more difficult. (Who says GMing isn't a hella demanding
performing art?)

Part of the problem is that there is
really little in the way of outside assistance to help a brother out.

How strange it is in a hobby where we
are almost buried in the sheer amount and diversity of free and
commercial products that we haven't really produced any great, go-to
guides on mastering the theatrics of the game table. You can read
hundreds of pages of mind-numbing minutiae about things like the
culinary predilections of Subspecies 35 Elf, but almost nothing about
how to do something that happens thousands of times a week in as many
play groups: describe a wilderness area that “pops” without
boring your players to tears.

So what's to be done?

The best answer I've come up with is
starting to pay attention in my readings to the best passages of naturalists (the
new tendency to want to substitute “nature writer” or “natural
historian” leaves me cold)--or barring that the best descriptions
of writers closer to home in speculative fiction. Read a few pages of
the sad ruminations of Aldo Leopold or the caustic and anarchic Ed
Abbey and you find pure gold: a vibrant and well-paced descriptive
art.

Let me start showing and not telling.

Take the opening of The Willows by
Algernon Blackwood, a horror tale made all the more melancholy and
terrifying by the attention to the “mundanity” (yes, that is a
word Open Office) of natural detail:

“After leaving
Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a
region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread
away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country
becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low
willow-bushes...

In high flood
this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown islands is
almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes bend and
rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the sunshine
in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows never
attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they
remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on
slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple
as grasses, and so continually shifting that they somehow give the
impression that the entire plain is moving and alive...

Happy to slip
beyond the control of the stern banks, the Danube here wanders about
at will among the intricate network of channels intersecting the
islands everywhere with broad avenues down which the waters pour with
a shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids;
tearing at the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and
willow-clumps; and forming new islands innumerably which shift daily
in size and shape and possess at best an impermanent life, since the
flood-time obliterates their very existence.”

Ok paragraph two is a bit excessive
and smacking of things too poetical to be of use. But trim out half that
and you have a description that evokes a great gaming wilderness
scene in less than a minute of breath.

Obviously the answer here is “we
should all become incredibly-talented writers”, but I do take away
from this and other passages that there are elements worth trying to
ape.

Here's a start—and I will add to this
as my thinking out loud continues:

Pay Attention to the Whole Package.
How does the whole area fit together in your mind's eye? If you think
it's “just woods” you are likely to describe the trees and maybe
the underbrush. But if it's a “high alpine basin choked with
conifers and warmed by geysers” the details started clicking
together an evocative unit.

Mood is Important. It's not just
a swamp or some willows on an island: it's a twisting, moody,
almost-sentient labyrinth of shifting channels with great beauty and
the hint of something unknowable.

Short Laundry Lists Help.
Trotting out a single line of small details can help color it all
immensely with a veneer of how sweeping the diversity of the area is.
Take this from Abbey's Down the River (and this is not his best): “We
listen for the breathing of the Minotaur but find only cottonwoods
glowing green and gold against the red rock, rabbitbrush with its
mustard-yellow bloom, mule-ear sunflowers facing the sunlight...and
curled horns of a desert bighorn ram, half-buried in the auburn
sand.”

Brevity. This is the trickiest
part take all of that above and try and distill it down to
descriptions less than a minute—closer to half that really if
possible. Take all those mental descriptors you are now mulling in
your brain to sex up your wilderness area--and then cut that by half.
When you are done cut it again, dropping all but the most essential
of adjectives. (Note my impatient ellipses in the quotes above.)

This post is growing overlong and my
list incomplete, any tricks of the trade you lean upon? What do you
do to make your wilderness areas pop? What do your players say?